HISTORICAL FOUNDATIONS OF INTERSECTIONAL EXCLUSIONS OF GENDER, RACE AND CLASS IN THE BRAZILIAN REPUBLICAN CONTEXT

THE FIGURE OF THE "CITIZEN-WOMAN" IN THE DISCOURSES OF HEGEMONIC FEMINISM (1919-1934)

Resumo

Between the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century, women from various countries mobilised politically to demand equal political and civil rights, as well as equal access to formal education and to hitherto impenetrable sectors of the labour market for women. In the wake of European and American liberal feminism, hegemonic Brazilian feminism built its discourse of political legitimation on the idealized figure of the "citizen-woman", operating a strategic updating of certain gender, race and class stereotypes. The aim of this paper is to understand how the discourses of a movement self-defined as universalist have historically contributed to the recognition of rights for a particular group of women, while reinforcing intersectional exclusions based on these three social markers. To this end, this analysis will focus on the representations and the discursive artifices mobilised in the discourses produced by the feminist movement led by Gilberta Lutz to justify the inclusion of women to citizenship, to prestigious professions and to spaces of power historically defined as masculine, between 1919 and 1934. The choice of sources is justified by the national and international visibility acquired by the aforementioned movement, the privileged dialogue that its representatives established with the republican political classes and their decisive participation in the political clashes of the time on the redefinition of the role of women in the private, public and labour spaces. Analysed from the decolonial theoretical and methodological arsenal, these discourses of political legitimation show that, far from intending to question the complex structures and power relations that produce social, political and economic asymmetries between the various categories of women, the political integration project of Brazilian republican feminism focused rather on the means to acquire a certain permeability in the spaces of power and to maintain its dominant position in society.